'The Divide' review: Strong drama explores justice system

Marin Ireland as Christine Rosa and Paul Schneider as Clark Rylance in "The Divide," a new drama that focuses on the nuances of crime and punishment.

Marin Ireland as Christine Rosa and Paul Schneider as Clark Rylance in "The Divide," a new drama that focuses on the nuances of crime and punishment.

Photo: Steve Wilkie, We TV

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Photo: Steve Wilkie, We TV

'The Divide' review: Strong drama explores justice system

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The Divide: 9 p.m. Wednesday on WE channel.

If you're wary of shows with a political or sociological ax to grind, you should be, for the most part. That's because more often than not, credible characters and plots are pushed to the background in favor of advocacy.

I admit that's what I expected with WE's new series "The Divide," created by Richard LaGravenese ("Behind the Candelabra") and Tony Goldwyn ("Scandal"), premiering Wednesday night. Instead, what I found was an intelligently nuanced, character-driven legal thriller first, and an all-sides-represented discussion of possible defects in the justice system second.

Christine Rosa (Marin Ireland, "Revolutionary Road") works for an organization called the Innocence Initiative, a fictionalization of the very real Innocence Project. No one would want to see an innocent person executed, but it's personal for Christine because her own father is on death row for something she knows he didn't do and his appeals are all but exhausted.

Christine and colleague Clark Rylance (Paul Schneider, "Parks and Recreation") are marshalling their efforts to keep a former construction worker named Jared Bankowski (Chris Bauer, "True Blood") from being executed for the murder of all but one member of a family 12 years earlier. Bankowski is no saint, and has been on death row long enough to stop hoping for a reprieve. His mother, Ida (Ann Dowd, "The Leftovers"), is a hateful piece of work, but not to the point where we could overlook Bankowski's culpability if, in fact, he did participate in the murders.

"The Divide" doesn't fall into a facile delineation of good guys versus bad guys, which not only makes it credible, but also keeps a tight hold on our attention. On the other side of "the divide" is District Attorney Adam Page (Damon Gupton, "Rake"), who prosecuted the original case and is politically ambitious. His wife, Billie Page (Nia Long, "House of Lies"), is also an attorney, but working in the private sector. Still, she has her doubts about the case.

Page's father, Isaiah (Clarke Peters, "Tremé"), is the Philadelphia police commissioner and has no doubts that the case against Bankowski is a righteous one.

Adam Page is sure the case is solid as well, but he has a conscience and is not so ambitious that it would keep him from reopening the case if there were reason to do so.

Almost every character is developed with an intriguingly complex moral point of view, augmented by the fact that Bankowski and his co-defendant, Terry Kucik (Joe Anderson, "The River") are white, as are Christine and Clark, while the district attorney and his family are African American, as were the victims of the crime. Does race play a role here? To an extent, it does, but not in any kind of knee-jerk, formulaic way. Instead, "The Divide" reflects the reality of race in contemporary American cities like Philadelphia.

The pilot episode relies on the ticking clock template often employed when TV has a guy who's about to die by lethal injection. Yet, along the way, we become primarily fascinated with the characters, how they are created, how they think, and how much they may be examining their own thoughts about the justice system.

Yes, there is a message behind the show's characters and story line. Or, more to the point, multiple messages, because the strength of the show is that it reflects the truth that the justice system was created and is administered by men and women, who have complicated thoughts and points of view, and who may mean well, or be blinded by their own frailty and ambition.